Brought to mind an old Pill and Dudley story.....

The Disappointment.....

It went viral ! That is to say, a video posted on social media had many hundreds of thousands of views in just a short while. In a matter of days, the hits were several millions. It (the video) was dim and grainy and surely seemed dramatized (fake) to me. It showed what was said to be a naked anthropomorphic cryptid beast, most certainly an extraterrestrial, lying on an autopsy table. The video was of strange hues.....something between black & white and sepia and infrared green like it had been treated to infer either great age (roswell era) or more modern but night-visioned hidden body-cam. The beast was all knotty and warty and lumpy and otherwise asymmetrically misshapened.....the unfortunate englisher joe merrick comes to mind.

I was killing time in one of those strip mall coffee shops, slash internet cafes, slash newstand joints while the old lady, er....beloved bride was off in other stores spending my hard earned coin. All I wanted to do was have an honest cup of joe and read the latest john taffin article. I had no trouble finding the latest john taffin article but finding an honest cup of plain black joe in a coffee joint ain't exactly easy. All that girly coffee with complicated, exotic names. I explained what I wanted to the butchy wench clerking the counter and got a triple unsweetened espresso pulled (thinned ?) with hot water for my troubles and four of washington's photographs.

I had just settled into mister taffin's superbly photographed primer on the histories of and differences between the american, russian, and remington special .44 cartridges.....waiting for the coffee to cool to just under tongue scalding when an impertinent fellow, quite uninvited, sat down to my table. 'Twas ok however. The interloper turned-out to be no other than my old friend euell _____, otherwise known as Pill. He had one of those newfangled "smartphones" and was watching a video on it. He replayed the video for my benefit and it was the morgue scene I described at the beginning of this tale.

"Taint no alien attall !", murmured Pill.... "It's a human and I've seen one just like it before but in that case, the fellow survived !"

Hows abouts we dispense with all of the confusing dialogue and quotation marks and just let me simply tell you what Pill said from his perspective but to the point, without his penchant for long-winded, convulated prattling.

You remember james dudley of course. Maybe what you don't know was his tendency to bring lawsuits. He got it quite honestly however. There have been plaintiffs in dudley's ancestry, at least every other generation nearly all the way back until one of noah's daughter-in-laws squeezed-out the first dudley. The modern, extant dudley had the phone numbers of all of the birmingham 1-800 ambulance chasers preprogrammed onto his speed dial and he was always diligently on the hunt for an opportunity to call them.

One of several examples.....Way back in the day, on a crappie and/or white bass expedition, he was trying to un-snag the treble hook of an inline spinner from a driftwood limb on the rip-rapped banks of the coosa river. He overextended his balance and fell and busted his left knee on either a rip or a rap....not sure which.....anyways, a jagged piece of feldspar larger than a cobble but not quite a boulder. Dudley keeps a stiff upper lip and tried not to limp too obviously and gimps into work at the tire company owned cord mill the following monday where he feigns an industrial injury with an inopportune trip over a portruding bolt. He settled for knee replacement and subsequent therapies and something north of $40,000 which netted him $17,500 after the ambulance chasers deducted their vigorish.

Of course the tire company was rightly obligated to let him go and the union was apathetic. That $17,500 did not last long and there he was with a sore, stiff leg and a documented pre-existing medical condition and no immediate job prospects. He was however, by virtue of his brief police career(s), tenured and vested in the municipal/state pension scheme so, knowing that he would never be able to don a badge again, he approached the Scroggins brothers for a billet as some form of municipal civil servant.

At the corner of sparks and sterling, Wino Hurd was operating the ancient rattletrap backhoe with the sluggish hydraulic system and much wear and play in the boom swivel. Patch Simpson was spotter.....on watch for sight of the sewer main in hopes that he could keep the backhoe's bucket's teeth from ripping into it. It was either Roscoe or unidentical twin Woodrow Scroggins who was supervising, Pill could not remember which who Dudley approached to ask for a job. Just as Roscoe or Woodrow, as the case may be was apologetically explaining that there were no current vacancies, Wino endeavored to shake mud from the bucket by energetically manipulating the boom and, what with all of the play and unresponsive controls, he manipulated the bucket right into the side of Dudley's fragile skull.

Dudley was down for the count and then some.....in fact he was airlifted to a famous Roman (ga. not ital.) trauma center. But apparently those ambulance chasing solicitors/barristers have a keen and sensitive telepathy of sorts and several days before Dudley regained consciousness, they had negotiated both a generous cash settlement and a meter reading job to boot.

In six weeks Dudley could sit-up and feed himself. In three months he had relearned to walk and was for the most part potty trained yet again. In six months he had by then quit seeing two of everything and the slurred speech and slobbery chin had abated substantially. In less than nine months from the time that Wino Hurd had nigh-on decapitated him with a backhoe, Dudley was a water and natural gas meter reader and chief of patona city's utilities truck #12.

He drove the truck and kept the route book....that is to say, he penciled-in the meter readings as either Sleepy Jackson or Pugsey Vanderhoot read the meters and called the results out to him. Not at all arduous but it never seemed to end and made for long days. Sometimes Dudley needed a break from sitting behind the wheel and he would exit the truck and stretch his legs a bit. With a background in law enforcement and a keen eye, he was always on the look for anything out of the ordinary. For some reason or another Dudley had a fascination with/of hornet's nests. Anytime he or his meter reading assistant would find a nest they would remember its location and return, at a convenient time with an aerosol can of wasp spray. After an interval of days or weeks they would fetch the now dead nest, tree limb and all, back to the city barn and hang it on the break room wall.

One blustering january midmorning on a walkabout break from meter reading, in a pine straw carpeted wood-lot between holes #7 and #8 at the local county-club Sleepy Jackson found a world record sized hornet's nest. Due to the cold temps and assuming the nest was dead they neglected the normal precautions of wasp spray and subsequent quarantine time to ensure its efficacy. The new giant trophy took its place of honor on the wall of Roscoe Scroggins' office.

Now Booby Moates, the certified lunatic amongst us was always larking and chafing Dudley. It was Booby's favourite pastime.....you know busting Dudley's balls every chance he got. While the boys were all admiring the size of the new hornet's nest, Booby kind of cautiously craw-fished up to it and cupped a hand over an ear in the posture of listening for any activity within. With a mischievous grin Booby waited until everyone had gone to lunch and Dudley had settled himself into Roscoe's comfy office chair for a nooner siesta. Booby made sure Dudley's eyes were closed and when his breathing evened into sombulence Booby applied a lit match to the base of the paper exterior of the hornet's nest.

The utilities crew returned from lunch to find the bomberos venting the smoke and hornets from Roscoe's office. Dudley, was being loaded into an ambulance, bare down to his skivvies, writhing in pain, all swollen and lumpy and misshapen with stings.....his face frozen in a silent scream of anaphylaxis and turning an ugly hue while Fatass Delores Heathcote was preparing an atropine/epinephrine injection.

And that was that. This was what he had meant at the beginning by saying that he had seen a similar subject to the one in the video. Certainly a lackluster ending and not up Pill's usual raconteurial efforts. I was quite let-down , expecting, if not an outright punchline, at least a thought-provoking twist of irony. I left my coffee, cold and unfinished on the table along with the glossy with the taffin article and went in search of my wife to ken just how much damage had been done to the credit card balance.